


ghost stories

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Basically PWP, F/M, PeepoRun, Sort of Dub-con, go play the games or something, so like, spoilers for the game and dlc, the Fade is literally dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28401495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: Dreams are reflections of refractions--a composite of borrowed images drawn from someone else's memories blurred with your own. A mage should know this, if she has had any dealings with the Fade.Shaping them to her desires could possibly be one way to control bad dreams.
Relationships: Solas/Female Trevelyan (Dragon Age)
Kudos: 6





	ghost stories

**I** t starts with a flicker, a glint of light in the once dark and quiet night. The silence is sundered with the breath of a candle guttering to life. This light and this sound are a start to the conflagration that will serve as a beacon to what waits, lurking, in the phantasmagoric shadows. Like a moth, what is drawn will come because it has been dazzled by what has disturbed the immanent senses which once guided and persevered it through the perils of the night. What came along lured the moth away from the paths it had charted using the bodies suspended in the void of the heavens.

That’s how she thinks about it, sometimes. That it—that she—was something that never should have been put in his path. It wasn’t meant to be. _You weren’t._

Now she holds her arms extended, reaching to something she cannot see, bare feet en pointe, making herself vulnerable in reflection of a capable dancer. In a stern tone that has nothing to do with her and all to do with his self-dissatisfaction, so she thinks through the profound discomfort of her posture, he tells her to face him, that the shadows aren’t quite right. Something isn’t quite right.

For such a solemn man his bleeding heart has so often bled through him within her sight.

_That’s not quite right._

_You saw me, when so few rarely did. And what I told you was true. I did not see you, not at first. My own shadows dimmed your brilliance._

_It’s not that you weren’t enough._

_It was my own failing to remove the scales from my eyes._

There is a moment where neither of them say anything nor move even a fraction of a fraction, breath lost like irretrievable innocence. He does not see anything else but her. Not a single thing that her world might have had to offer.

She stands there without a single ripple in the gossamer of her dress, the diaphanous fabric which shimmers like a haze of pleasant dreams with even the slightest of twitches.

Something then flares through the stillness and silence, and it is like the world wavers for a moment—splintering, just for a moment, into swirls and whorls and stranger shapes still—until everything snaps back with an incisively cruel clarity. Understanding of something inevitable has suffused the space between them. 

For he repeats himself, and then steps forward as if already he knows she will not quite comply to his instructions to shift herself for him. _Tilt your head._

She stares at him as he comes nearer to her. There is nothing she ever easily learnt of him, not really, she realises as her world is narrowed down to nothing but his approach. A slim man, which is not uncommon for an elf, but broader shoulders than one might expect from one of his kind. The lack of markings she doesn’t quite understand and the smoothness of his shaved head accentuate the lines of his cheekbones that are proud and pointed as the art of elves she has seen scattered throughout the wide world they have trod together. The lashes catch the light and flaunt their copper tones, curving around the eyes that sometimes are grey, sometimes are green, sometimes even a storm’s end’s blue.

There is something else, too, stalking in the corner of his eyes that eludes her—a cloak’s edge that swirls just past her grasping fingers as she falls. It crouches in the corner of his frown, restrained and hidden. It bristles when his temper has rarely flared, harrowed and harrying. And it hides from her, it withdraws, it has shrunk from her each time she has attempted to approach him and figure out what part of himself he is keeping from her this time. To conceal such depths he has unspeakingly attested to the self-control which was wrought painfully, and not without dear sacrifice. 

_Indomitable._ The word emerges like all buried things eventually do. The friction of daily living, that grind of drudgery which strips away all varnishes of even the brightest souls eventually, rarely lets anything remain concealed which is not consciously entombed again and again and again until there remains no-one to suppress it from the revealing light of day.

Like prey stalked through dense woods her thoughts flit chaotically from point to point, unable to rise above the choked canopy and to the safety of an open sky. She is not quite cornered, she could move, she could tell him to keep his distance. But that wouldn’t save her from this. Those eyes that are tracing over her body, studying her, learning about her so that he can place her where she can best fulfill his purpose.

His control is like a corset pinching breath out of a body—it is structured and the product is exquisitely lovely to behold. But his control is not just for show. She knows that.

He is before her now. Looking down, reaching out, with one articulate finger he touches the tip of her chin and tilts her head up towards him. He then holds his graceful fingers around her throat. Slowly, his grasp begins to constrict. She can feel her heartbeat against his skin. And she knows—because it’s burning right down to her bright, brittle, luminous bones, through the layered and silted years of loneliness—that it is absolutely necessary. 

There is a slight ripple in his voice, an instant of coming up against a vast chasm and stilling, his control is in question for less than a breath as he says, ‘Stay. Just like that. I will capture you.’

She has no breath to exhale to relieve the blaze within her raging stomach. 

With a smirk he steps back to his easel and returns charcoal to canvas with deft, conscious, and able strokes that leave no room for question of his skill. His eyes flick back to her from the image he is crafting, back and forth and back and forth. Pausing a moment, he blows on his creation to chase away the dust. He does not look at her.

It is as if she is lost to herself, the way she feels like a whirlwind against him, futile as a breeze battering a mountain. 

And it does not make a single speck of sense. Not at all. None of it does.

For when has she ever yielded without cause? When has she ever let herself be the object of someone else’s work, no matter how grand or beautiful it may be?

She drops her hands and her head. Curls of gleaming hair rustle down her back, there is a whisper of silk as she skims her fingers across her thigh. This is her rebellion, quiet and soft A delicate thing perhaps called feminine and not recognised at first. But it is apparent to her that he has not missed a single instant of it. 

Across the distance between them she sees that he is as still as a living, breathing being can be. She can see his breath. Rising and falling in the slope of his shoulders. Just barely contained. 

And then it is.

A shiver across his skin snuffed out, a shimmer of gossamer grasped from the air before the butterfly’s wings can fully unfurl and catch the glister of the warm day’s sun. But there is still a glint in his eyes that flames like a meteorite, glorious and blazing, and for all its magnificence bound for an unalterable destiny.

Her foot, which is bare, settles on the ground, and the smooth tile beneath is on her skin. Now she is back on the ground. Her posture is her own, her body is her own, he never had a claim to it, there only ever was what she was willing to give him.

_Do you really believe that? That you didn’t wish to give yourself away?_

That, back then, she would not have thrown herself at his feet, would have submitted to him in perfect and peaceful completeness, if only it had meant that he would be swayed to bend to her desires?

_Consciousness flooding away, she was on her knees, with only a sense of a kiss that was already fading. That was all he left her with. In and out of her life, a happy and terrible and tragic accident ended. He told her, too, that he wished her to have whatever time remained as a time of solace, to live her life like it mattered, as if it mattered without him. This paltry parting offer on his part was nothing. Or less than nothing. It cost him precisely nothing while it cost her everything._

_Because she let it._

_It was—_

He charges towards her, charcoal tossed aside and one hand gripping the jawbone hung around his neck. Such a lack of subtlety she never would have ascribed to him before she truly knew him, he who never lied but never answered with what he knew you wanted to know. It hadn’t been a game but a dance with the antithesis of destiny, not an act or a show but something constructed nonetheless. And now that it is over with all the principal dancers gone their separate ways a coda seems like something that is utterly pointless. Or worse than that--burdensome. Like a pile of coats which must be carried across a heat scourged desert. 

And she steps forward too, flinging her hand up and drawing lines of power along with her through the world. Tingles churn across her skin in a kiss of static--what comes next is a sweet and familiar buzz of pain, a tiny sliver of discomfort paid in exchange for the violet violent storm she is about to summon and command.

He has wrenched the sardonic charm from his neck and the leather lace dangles in one hand. The blackened jawbone has cut deep into the palm of the other. He holds both of these things for a moment within her sight. Crimson flecks stain the tile floor around him. And, though she cannot see it, the unfinished portrait he wanted to make of her. 

It is not blood magic which he uses. Some connections mean too much for him to sever. She believes that, and it hurts when she feels the air freeze in her throat beneath her helpless, grasping hands. Her attack has not met with resistance, her assault has been broken by his much more thoughtful subterfuge.

_The best offense is a good defense._

She had never heard him say that, exactly, but there had been other pithy and trite things that made her burn with a desire to both kiss and kick him when he said them without a whiff of irony.

Now he has her hands bound before she can quite comprehend what he has done to her. Holding her close to him with her arms pinioned, his unbloodied hand rests on her throat that is choked up with chunks of ice. As he strokes the sensitive skin there, she feels the ice slowly, slowly begin to melt. She does not choke on the water, nor the air she desperately tries to shove into her lungs.

She struggles against him, kicking, headbutting, but he holds her still. He knows very well how to counteract a mage without resorting to barberism. 

Then he shoves her down to the ground, and the sudden rush of pinwheeling colours--all those vibrant reds and blues and dazzling golds and silvers come to life under his touch, all of the bold colours vivid as clear intentions--it all slides together into a mass of black that becomes a night sky teeming with the frenetic racing auroras. The sky, encircled by colossal peaks, is clear, and there are shards of silver in the air. From the moonlight, from the starlight, or from the snow, it is not clear, but she rolls to her side and fights to marshal herself. 

She kicks at him, and this time it works. He crashes to the ground in a surprised heap, more thrown off balance by the success, perhaps, than the force of her tactic. He never did admonish her for her tenacity, even if he never did quite understand it.

_It was the opposite of that, wasn’t it? Or not. It was just another thing that went unnoticed. Unseen, until he realised I was just as alive as he was, and by then it was too late. My answer to him did not serve its purpose. He found within it a meaning I never intended. One I could never have intended without knowing what he saw when he looked to the future without the possibility of us._

_‘_ What arrogance,’ she seethes, clutching at the leather lace looped around her wrists and incinerating it into a whisper of ashes. She launches herself at him and lands on his half-risen body. He is thrown-off, collapsing under the force of her momentum as she throws herself at a chance to get him under her control. A flare of green-licked light in one hand, a fistful of his shirt in another. She strikes at his heart and he deflects her Fade-forged weapon. Their scuffle in the snow does nothing to mar the feral, atrociously beautiful scenery. The mountains still stand, the auroras still slither. There is from above the sound of thousands of shards of shivering glass. Whatever the import of their struggle, it is nothing in measure to _all of this_.

She bites him and kicks him, aiming for the stomach to cripple the breath out of him. He grunts, and then exhales, a rough sound as haunting as any keening. A blow thrown at him is deflected with a raised arm, and then he has her wrist in his grasp. He wrenches her forward with a flare of frustration, and she flaps about like a wrung-out cloth. 

A curse rattles in her throat and then dies in her mouth as she is struck across the face. Stunned, she has no reaction to him throwing her down again on her stomach and straddling her. 

Something grazes right above the centre of her back, between her shoulder blades. Right behind her heart. With a flash of cold, undirected hostility she realises that at some point her dress has been ripped, what little protection it offered has been torn apart like a shredded contract. Her skin is fully on display to him.

As he stares at her, ghosting a trace of touch over her skin, the chill paralysing her recedes in the face of her rising, twisted, heat. Twined with her outrage is something far more consuming, and infinitely more dangerous to her sovereignty.

_Here I am again._

And then he hits here. Right on the back of her heart. 

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it? All that time.’

He does not allow her to answer. He knocks the air out of her lungs, again and again, waiting only long enough between each strike for her to not choke on her own surprise. Her silencing is deliberate.

‘I—’

The force slams at a different part of her this time, striking at her lower back and resonating in her arched hips.

‘This isn’t real, is it?’

‘That doesn’t make it hurt any less, does it?’ he asks, and once again he forbids her retort by smacking her across the back of her thighs.

Again. And again.

At first, she tries to shake him off. There is a clarion demand for her deserved freedom without a care for any blood which may be spilt. She writhes and bucks and turns her face towards the stars Eventually, her broken replies bleed into gasps. Her face turns down to the snow and her body spasms with pain complicated by overwhelming desire. 

The more he assails her, the more she withdraws, the louder the rumblings become. And resolved into an answer which has risen within her in answer to his touch.

‘You never touched me like this,’ she whispers to no-one.

_But you wanted me to, didn’t you?_

She is silent. The fight, the fury, the indignation, it is all gone. Spent, and the deficit that has collected is nowhere close to being paid.

They stay like that for a long time. She, quiescent, face in the snow and silently sobbing. He has stopped moving and is merely a weight upon her.

And then what?

_Do you really think that this is what would have happened next?_

‘I may want foolish things, but that doesn’t make me a fool,’ she says to the wolf whom she knows is lurking there among the dense trees. The foliage may be impassable, but this is not his territory. 

She needs him to realise that. Not only is he not welcome here, he no longer belongs.

_Ghost._

_Why won’t you let me be?_

_Is it because you’ve fooled yourself into believing you loved me?_

She turns to him, but she does not allow him to come any closer. She walks towards him, encroaches on him who lurks in the shadows. Then she turns back to observe the scene upon which the many red eyes of her voyeur have witnessed.

Her body seems limp below him, ecstatic in its tumultuous rapture of tormented pleasure. Though his body is still too, there is absolutely nothing at all which can be read from his stillness. Even the once vivid lust for another’s life has fled out of his eyes.

‘This isn’t about you. You are a stranger here,’ she says to him. 

He says nothing. 

And to his unasked question she answers, ‘Because I do not want you here.’

Still, there is nothing from him.

So, she asks him, because he never could deny himself the chance to explain to her something she wanted to hear. ‘Why, why won’t you leave me alone?’

But, though he is not the man in her dreams, nor is he the same man he used to be.

She should know that. She does know that.

For even the form he exists in here has been altered from what once was—he does not come to her as a man, but as a wolf who looks solemnly at the tangled tableau of human—elven—misery and passion and the quivering thread that barely exists between the two. Something more insubstantial than the Veil which still rests closely against their bodies in the world that yet remains.

And then, he does something she should have expected. The wolf whimpers, whines, lowers his head and turns. It is part apology, part self-pity, part goodbye. This is what he can offer. She knows he will disappear back into the impassable darkness, that shade from which he can no longer bear to completely emerge.

It is a histrionic metaphor, she thinks, which she has dreamt and he has composed, but then that is so fitting a thing that it stings and is embarrassing and it's revealing truth. She sighs.

With a single step, she crosses over the liminal space between. She is weary, she is tired, she sits down with her legs folded under her. Wisps, curious and playful, find her, though the world around her is shaded, dark, imperceptible like the Void.

And the wolf rests his head in her lap, surrendering himself to her undeserved touch. He lays limp, and she is not sure if it is because he is too timid or contrite or tired to push into her stroking fingers.

She says, ‘I don’t have anything left to give. All I had, you already have and have lost.’

She does not push him away.

Gentle as a breeze-stirred leaf, the wolf closes his many eyes. His paw comes to rest on her knee. Without any more sound made he remains there, sleeping within a dream. She knows with a settling peaceful emptiness that she could leave, if she wanted to. And he could follow, but would he? Would he continue to haunt her if she tried to move beyond his sight?

‘All that remains of our past are stories. Stories of who we were. Ghost stories.’

She buries her head in his fur, and the darkness and the silence of her dream remains folded around them.

**. . .**

**Author's Note:**

> So, like, yeah, it's been a wild few years since I was last here. My heart has been very glad and very broken, and yet here I remain. And so does Dragon Age. 
> 
> Whatever sort of a shitshow 4 might turn out to be, I think I always will be drawn to the themes that can be found here. And here's the thing: I definitely see them very differently now. If I can muster it I will attempt to bang out a work or two which capture the differences in my perspective rote life lessons have afforded me.


End file.
